Semi-Sharp Subdivision Shading

Abstract

Subdivision is a method for generating a limit surface from a coarse mesh by recursively dividing its faces into several smaller faces. This process leads to smooth surfaces, but often suffers from shading artifacts near extraordinary points due to the lower quality of the normal field there. The idea of subdivision shading is to apply the same subdivision rules that are used to subdivide geometry to also subdivide the normals associated with mesh vertices. This leads to smoother normal fields, which in turn removes the shading artifacts. However, the original subdivision shading method does not support sharp and semi-sharp creases, which are important ingredients in subdivision surface modelling. We present two approaches to extending subdivision shading to work also on models with (semi-)sharp creases.